As part of the CEE549 Geoenvironmental Engineering course that I teach this year at the University of Michigan, 15 graduate and upper-level undergraduate students worked in pairs on a topic of their choice with the intent to study and review in more depth a selected topic in geoenvironmental engineering. As I have done in previous years, the project deliverable is a report that is made available online by the students, so that practitioners and researchers outside the classroom can review them and provide feedback (in addition to my review). I have found that by “opening the classroom the Profession” through this class project, students are more excited to work on their project, and are very enthusiastic about receiving questions or feedback from professionals, improving at the end the learning process.

I wanted to invite you, until December 13th, to review and provide feedback on this year’s student projects. You can simply provide public comments/questions to the students using the commenting form that is available on their project page. Students will then be asked to address the review comments in their final report which will also remain online through Geoengineer.org, as useful technical content for geotechnical engineering professionals and students worldwide. I should mention that each of last year’s student reports were visited by thousands of visitors each year, which I did not expect!